


Underworlds: The Life and Afterlife of Richard Upton Pickman

by CenozoicSynapsid



Category: Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft
Genre: Gallery Notes, Gen, Ghouls, Modern Art
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-22
Updated: 2017-11-22
Packaged: 2019-02-05 07:45:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12789975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CenozoicSynapsid/pseuds/CenozoicSynapsid
Summary: Explore the life, works and enduring influence of Richard Upton Pickman, a controversial artist of the early 20th century. This exhibition includes several paintings never before displayed in public, including all of Pickman's graphic, unsettling "horrors" currently remaining in North America. The Boston Globe calledUnderworlds"stomach-turning food for thought"— but decide for yourself! Young children may find Pickman's paintings frightening; parents are advised to consider carefully before allowing them to proceed.This program serves as a guide to the exhibit. Audio versions for your mobile phone are available at the Parrington museum website.





	Underworlds: The Life and Afterlife of Richard Upton Pickman

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wererogue](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wererogue/gifts).



Richard Upton Pickman (1888-1926) is an unsettling figure in the history of American painting. His short career spans the tumultuous first decades of the 20th century, a period which transformed Pickman’s native Boston forever. Like many American artists of his time, Pickman struggled to find an appropriate reaction to the emerging Modernist movement. In the aftermath of the First World War, many painters chose to abandon realism for more abstract styles such as Cubism and Expressionism, forms in which they felt they could express the speed, chaos and brutality of the postwar era. Pickman found another path; throughout the 1920s, his work grew steadily more realistic in form, while at the same time incorporating outlandish imagery of a parallel world populated by corpse-devouring ghouls.

Pickman’s grotesque “horrors” eloquently express the terrible ordeal of his wartime service as well as his anxieties about his troubled marriage to Amelia Hunt Vernon (1896-1961). But his contemporaries considered his realism passé, and rejected his nightmarish subject matter as offensive. Cut off from the art world, he became increasingly obsessed and alienated, further increasing the strain on his family. In the end, the nightmares won out: Amelia suffered a psychotic episode in 1926 and killed the couple’s 6-year-old daughter Catherine. Pickman disappeared later that year, a probable suicide.

In a grim irony, Pickman’s reputation has only increased since his untimely death. Though he would have rejected the Modernist label, his work presages a variety of contemporary artistic movements; today, the “Pickmanesque” is a recognizeable aesthetic. Pickman’s impact is felt in comics, Hollywood movies and the work of artists like portraitist Chuck Close. In this exhibit, the Samuel Mather Parrington museum brings together works from Pickman’s entire career, including several never before displayed in public.

## Gallery 1: Influences

Born to an old New England family, Richard Upton Pickman was raised in the North End heart of colonial-era Boston. As a boy, his parents recorded his fascination with the neighborhood’s colorful history: “Ritchie is very pleased with the Hawthorne stories you sent for him, and will not put the book down, especially since we told him the old family story of Goody Ellen being hanged at Salem. We have promised to take him to see the North Church, where Cotton Mather preached…” (Abigail Dexter Pickman to Thomas Dexter, 1898). It was an interest which would last the rest of his life.

Pickman enjoyed sketching and watercolors, and his parents encouraged him to pursue an artistic career, paying for him to attend the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 1906. Founded in 1877 with leftover funding from the Centennial Exposition of 1876, RISD’s curriculum mixed classical academic realism with newer influences. Instructors like Mabel May Woodward painted in an Impressionist style which emphasized light, texture and emotional resonance over realism and detail. Few of Pickman’s student paintings survive, though his striking large canvas, “Ugolino”, illustrates his technical mastery of the Impressionist style alongside an eye for illustrative detail. It also shows his taste for the grotesque, a theme which would only intensify in his later career.

**Mabel May Woodward,[“Red Fish House”](http://www.artnet.com/artists/mabel-may-woodward/red-fish-house-buCmUf6lovu5iFqYnZ7Bxg2)**

Woodward graduated from RISD in 1896, and remained there as a teacher throughout the early 1900s. This waterfront scene emphasizes the old-fashioned charm of the Nova Scotia fishing village where she painted it; the weathered wood and peeling paint of the fishing hut are juxtaposed with the sunlit sand and water. The impressionistic treatment of light and shadow are typical of Woodward’s technique.

**Richard Upton Pickman, “The Breakwater, Salem”**

Pickman shared Woodward’s fascination with fishing villages and the sea; most of his surviving landscapes have a maritime theme. Here, sunlight shines through the clouds on a windy day. The frothing surf runs across the center of the picture, set off by the barren sand of the foreground and the whitewashed lighthouse in the rear left.

**Richard Upton Pickman, “Charter Street”**

This rare Boston street scene must have been painted during one of Pickman’s school vacations in Boston. The reflection of the red-tinged sunset on the slate roofing tiles is a characteristically Impressionist touch. But Pickman’s fascination with Boston’s history is evident in the careful brushwork details of the old-fashioned doorframes and window shutters.

**Gustav Doré,[“Ugolino and Ruggieri”](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DVinfernoUgolinoGnawingHeadOfRuggieari_m.jpg) **

Gustav Doré (1832-83), a French engraver and illustrator, was an important influence on Pickman’s early work. His illustrations of texts like Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” and Dante’s “Divine Comedy” provided what Pickman called “a bridge… between dream and life. As if he had been present at that terrible scene, and simply recorded…” (RUP to Amelia Vernon). This illustration, from Canto XXXII of the Divine Comedy, shows Dante and Virgil in the 9th Circle of Hell, where Ugolino gnaws at the head of his archenemy, Archbishop Ruggieri, eternally avenging himself for his imprisonment and death by starvation. 

**Richard Upton Pickman, “Ugolino”**

Painted in his final year at RISD, Pickman’s “Ugolino” owes much to Doré’s. The two figures are similarly posed, and he has borrowed the motif of damned souls writhing beneath the ice. But Pickman removes Dante and Virgil from the picture entirely, preferring to focus on Ugolino’s tortured expression as he takes his gruesome revenge. In the background, the massive figure of Satan rises from the center of Hell, half-glimpsed through the concealing mists.

**John Singer-Sargent[“Portrait of Robert Brough”](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/Portrait_of_Robert_Brough_by_John_Singer_Sargent_%28detail%29.jpg)**

Graduating from RISD in 1909, Pickman must have imagined himself joining the ranks of Boston’s fashionable “society painters”. Singer-Sargent, an American expatriate living in Paris, was the most successful of these portraitists, painting the leading figures of Boston society as well as several murals in public buildings. His portrait of the Scottish artist Robert Brough shows the sitter’s curious, intellectual character.

**Richard Upton Pickman, “Portrait of James Eliot”**

James Eliot, three years younger than Pickman, was another aspiring artist. The two met at the Boston Art Club and became fast friends; the wealthy Eliots commissioned this portrait of their son as a favor, providing Pickman with an entry into the exclusive world of Boston society. Pickman emphasizes the youthful Eliot’s boisterousness and good nature. His unguarded expression was probably captured photographically, a technique Pickman often used to avoid lengthy sittings.

## Gallery 2: Building a Career

Although Pickman’s early career as an artist was moderately successful, the years of society portraiture were drawing to a close. In 1913, the Armory Show introduced the American public to new Modernist styles from Europe: Cubism, Fauvism and Abstract Expression. American artists reacted to the new styles in different ways, some adopting them wholesale while others applied more traditional techniques to modern subjects. The “Ashcan school”, most active in New York City, depicted the urban working class amid noisy, densely-packed cityscapes.

Pickman rejected the new forms as “repellent, incomprehensible daubing” (1913, RUP to James Eliot), and his own work shows a deepening reaction against Modernism, becoming more and more realistic throughout the period. Though he phrased his opinions in aesthetic terms, his letters of the period suggest roots in his attitude toward Boston’s changing landscape. Immigration and new construction were transforming the North End; streets of Colonial houses were demolished to make room for tightly-packed row houses filled with Irish, Jewish and Italian immigrants. Pickman’s parents moved to the newer neighborhood of Back Bay in 1914. Meanwhile, his 1915 marriage to Amelia Hunt Vernon left him in tenuous financial circumstances; over the next several years, he struggled to make ends meet.

**Theresa Bernstein,[“Polish Church, Easter Morning”](https://theresabernstein.newmedialab.cuny.edu/?attachment_id=2728)**

This close-packed scene shows a multi-ethnic Catholic congregation in a crowded Manhattan church. Bernstein, a Jew of Polish descent, shows the congregants as individuals; some concentrate devoutly on the service while others crane their necks for a better view, or exchange sly glances across the room.

**Richard Upton Pickman, “Early Mass, St. Stephen’s”**

St. Stephen’s Church, built by Congregationalists in 1802, was sold in 1862 to the Roman Catholic Church to serve the North End’s growing population of Irish Catholics. Pickman depicts the interior of the church as dark and smoke-filled, dimly lit by candles and the ominous glow of the priest’s thurible. The colonnaded interior is vast and empty above, crammed with people below. Seen from behind, the congregants are a featureless, anonymous mass.

**Richard Upton Pickman, “Amelia Vernon Pickman at Her Desk”**

Pickman’s family was friendly with the Vernons, and Pickman had corresponded with Amelia, a talented amateur artist, throughout his college years. The friendship deepened after his graduation and return to Boston, and they were married in 1915. Over the next three years, he painted at least seven portraits of her, often in casual household settings such as this one. Amelia’s intense, expressionless gaze may indicate absorption in the drawing in front of her. Alternately, it may signal one of her “blue moods”: sudden, intense depressive episodes now believed to be early symptoms of her developing schizophrenia.

**Richard Upton Pickman, “The Regicides”**

In 1916, Pickman’s friend Arthur Davis suggested that he supplement his income by creating illustrations for textbooks. Though initially reluctant to draw historical scenes which might not be “true to life”, Pickman’s need for money eventually persuaded him to change his mind. He later wrote to thank Davis for overcoming his stubbornness: “I had thought it was impossible to really see into the past, but after my research [for a recent contract], I find that I can hardly see anything else! Simply walking about the streets, I see here and there flashes of Boston as it was, and glimpse black-coated Puritans emerging from the darkened alleys” (1917). This engraving depicts John Dixwell, William Goffe and Edward Whalley, Englishmen who signed the death warrant of Charles I in 1649 and fled to New England after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.

**George Bellows,[“Cliff Dwellers”](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dd/Bellows_CliffDwellers.jpg)**

One of the most famous images of the Ashcan school, this painting depicts the crowded streets of the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Flapping laundry gives the street a festive air; in the foreground, the crowded street is filled with children playing as their parents gossip and laugh. Bellows does not romanticize the inner city, but depicts it as a vibrant and dynamic community.

**Richard Upton Pickman, “The Passing of the Great Race”**

Pickman read Madison Grant’s book The Passing of the Great Race in 1917, the year after appeared, probably as part of his historical research. Grant’s efforts to preserve the “Nordic race” of Anglo-Americans from foreign immigrants made his text a bible for “Scientific racism” and the Eugenics movement. Pickman here shows immigrants (probably Italians) disembarking from a White Star transatlantic steamer. The composition shows Pickman’s stylistic movement away from Impressionism, and the increasing influence of his engravings on his painterly style. Harsh light picks out the individual features of the immigrants’ faces, highlighting features one critic called “dull, brutalized, and brutish”; Pickman would reconsider Grant’s racial theories in the aftermath of the First World War.

## Gallery 3: The War Years

While the First World War began in 1914, the United States remained set on neutrality until the 1915 sinking of the passenger liner _Lusitania_ , finally entering the war in 1917. Pickman, increasingly concerned with reports of German atrocities in Belgium, volunteered for the 26th Infantry Division, where he served as a Lieutenant with a field artillery unit.

Pickman’s skill as a draftsman was invaluable in creating maps of the German trench systems as the 26th withheld heavy German attacks at Chateau-Thierry before counterattacking at Belleau Wood. The inexperienced Americans faced a “crucible of fire and steel” (Fifield 1946); as a forward observer, Pickman was often stationed at the extreme front of the line. Returning home in 1919, he wrote to his fellow surveyor Alexander Thurber: “I still see in my sleep those unforgettable sights. I hear the screams and the explosions. I smell the stench of corpses. I wish I did not dream”. The intensity of his experiences is apparent in Pickman’s increasingly hyperrealist style.

**Amelia Vernon Pickman, “Portrait of Richard Pickman”**

This charcoal sketch shows Pickman in army uniform shortly before his departure for France in early 1918. It is a rare surviving image of Pickman, who seems to have disliked his own facial features (see “The Changeling” in the next gallery). Some critics describe his faint half-smile as affectionate; others see an expression of worry for the struggle ahead.

**Unknown artist(s),[“Trench map of the Premontre, Oise & Aisne Canal Region”](http://digitalarchive.mcmaster.ca/islandora/object/macrepo%3A70752/-/collection)**

By 1918, trench systems on the Western Front were complex, multilayered defenses which could be several miles in depth. This 1:20,000 scale map was used to plan artillery fire. Allied trenches are shown in blue, German trenches in red. Army surveyors rarely signed their work, so none of Pickman’s maps can be specifically identified, but they would likely have resembled this one.

**Hugh Henry Breckinridge,[“The Pestilence”](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Breckenridge_The_Pestilence_by1918.jpg)**

Disease was a scourge of the trenches, causing perhaps a third of the war’s total casualties. This painting, in the starkly-colored Fauvist style, depicts War and Death above an apocalyptic landscape in which otherwise healthy young people lie dying, their expressions filled with fear and pain.

**Claggett Wilson,[“Grenadier Cut Off in the Flaming Woods”](https://s3.amazonaws.com/assets.saam.media/files/styles/x_large/s3/files/images/1981/SAAM-1981.163.4_1.jpg?itok=QEddvb7X)**

Wilson, like Pickman, served as a Lieutenant in the American Expeditionary Force, earning multiple decorations including the Croix de Guerre. An early American proponent of the new Modernism, Wilson abstracts away from details, emphasizing the doomed grenadier’s frantic expression against the heat of the burning forest. Although Wilson’s art was not commercially successful, critics preferred it to Pickman’s more traditional style, one calling it “America's most ambitious contribution to the memory of the Great War” (Philadelphia Inquirer).

**Richard Upton Pickman, “The Shell Crater”**

Painted immediately after his return to Boston, this extremely detailed canvas is believed to depict one of the “unforgettable sights” which tormented Pickman’s dreams. During the Battle of Chateau-Thierry, he was forced to take cover in a shell crater during a German assault, spending nearly ten hours huddled against the corpse of a German soldier. “His face bore a ghastly rictus, half scream and half snarl. He grew slowly stiff and cold against me, and all the while the flares and spotlights lit him as clearly as the north light of a Boston studio” (RUP to Alexander Thurber). Pickman’s painting does not show himself, but takes a more detached viewpoint, showing nearly photographic details of the dead man’s face, hands and weapons.

**Richard Upton Pickman, “Rats”**

This small painting shows three large rats swimming at the bottom of a flooded trench. A soldier’s empty helmet, half-visible above the surface, hints at the nearby corpses which have drawn these voracious scavengers. Pickman’s wartime experiences led to a re-evaluation of his earlier racist views: “If the Nordic Race is passing, let it pass. Let all the races of man merge or not as they will— whatever rottenness is in us, is in us all” (RUP to Newton Reid).

**George Matthews Harding,[“Machine Gunners, Argonne”](https://wwionline.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2014/06/WW-12.jpg)**

Commissioned as an official war artist in 1918, Harding’s sketches, lithographs and photography served to document the grim reality of trench warfare for the American public. Harding shows No-Man’s-Land as a sparse, abstract landscape of downed trees and ribbons of wire. The faces of the American spotter and rifleman are obscured; only the gunner is visible as he fires his weapon at an unseen threat.

**Amelia Vernon Pickman, “Portrait of Richard Pickman”**

While Pickman was initially glad to be reunited with his wife, the symptoms of what would now be called post-traumatic stress were an increasing strain on their relationship, and on Amelia’s tenuous mental health. Amelia’s pregnancy, in late 1919, came at first as a longed-for development, but Pickman soon found himself tormented by fears that the child had been conceived before his return from Europe. (Critics are uncertain whether this anxiety had any foundation in truth.) Amelia depicts her husband as a haggard figure, wearing the “thousand-yard stare” of a veteran whose war has not yet ended. Pickman’s relationship with his wife and new daughter Catherine continued to deteriorate in the years to come. 

## Gallery 4: The Horrors

In 1922, Pickman first began work on his most famous series of paintings. The “horrors”, as he called them, would both make and destroy his reputation as an artist. In form, they are throwbacks to the 19th century: large, academic-style paintings for which Pickman prepared detailed preliminary sketches and studied photographs to ensure his backgrounds were accurate in texture and perspective. But their content is perhaps too radically nihilistic for the period; they depict a grotesque alternate reality, stalked by doglike creatures called “ghouls” which prey upon humanity, devouring the living and the dead alike.

Pickman’s first attempt to exhibit one of these paintings, Ghoul Feeding, debuted at the Boston Art Club in 1924. It was received with extreme controversy; Pickman’s army comrade Alexander Thurber considered it a work of genius, while fellow artist Joseph Minot called it “not only disgusting but the product of immoral influences” (Club minutes); the Club forced him to take it down after only a day. By 1925, as further, and even more radical works appeared, even Pickman’s supporters began to waver, and his declining reputation cost him several lucrative illustrating contracts. These stresses took their toll on both Richard and Amelia Pickman, whose fraught relationship seems to have fueled a mutual descent into mental instability.

Exactly what triggered the tragic events of 1926 may never be known. On February 16th, Amelia Pickman suffered a psychotic episode, during which she murdered six-year-old Catherine Pickman with a kitchen knife, then begged her neighbors for protection from imagined pursuers whom she may have imagined in the form of her husband’s “ghouls”. Richard Pickman disappeared later that year, strongly suspected to have shot himself at his North End studio, where he is known to have kept a loaded revolver to protect his art supplies from rats. Though Pickman afficionados continue to speculate that the studio contained yet more unfinished “horrors”, it was never discovered by the authorities, and was probably demolished during construction work in the North End two years later. The paintings in this exhibition are the only “horrors” known to exist in North America; private collectors in China and Germany claim to own two more, but have refused access to academics for purposes of assessment.

**Unknown artist,[“Frieze, West Front of Lincoln Cathedral ”](https://www.flickr.com/photos/29057345@N04/3617313514)**

For Medieval Christians, demons were ever-present threats to the living and tormentors of the damned in Hell. They were depicted as grotesque fusions of human and animal, standing upright, but with the claws and talons of birds of prey, and the snarling faces of boars or wolves. Some images of demons draw inspiration from Greco-Roman mythology, adding the cloven hooves of satyrs or the serpentine appendages of the Medusa. This twelfth-century frieze from Lincoln Cathedral, restored in the 19th century, vividly depicts the torments of sinners after death.

**Nicholas Roerich,[“The Destruction of Atlantis”](https://www.wikiart.org/en/nicholas-roerich/the-destruction-of-atlantis-1928)**

The Russian artist Nicholas Roerich set off for Central Asia in 1925, creating a series of paintings inspired by Tibetan and Indian Buddhist temple architecture. Though his finished work did not appear until 1928-9, Pickman met him in New York and they may have corresponded during the expedition. Certainly the flat roofs and keyhole-shaped lintel stones in this foreboding image are reminiscent of those in Pickman’s subterranean world. Unlike Pickman’s monsters, Roerich’s are formless, equivocal shapes, perhaps merely extensions of the angry waves rushing through the flooded streets.

**Clark Ashton Smith,[“The Charnel God”](https://sergiykrykun.deviantart.com/art/The-Charnel-God-Clark-Ashton-Smith-341135455)**

A contemporary of Pickman’s, Clark Ashton Smith was a prolific writer and illustrator of so-called “Weird fiction”: commercial tales of fantasy, horror and the macabre. During the late 1920s, he produced over a hundred short stories for pulp magazines like Wonder Stories and Weird Tales. Smith was a self-taught artist with no formal education past grammar school; Pickman found his work imaginative, but was dismissive of its artistic merit, criticizing its flat backgrounds and simple techniques: “A true artist must see further. True fear does not hide itself behind shadows and masks, but vaunts itself in the daylight, in the faces of living men” (RUP to James Eliot).

**Richard Upton Pickman, “Ghoul Feeding”**

This 1924 painting is probably not the first of Pickman’s “horrors” to be painted, but is certainly the first which he considered a finished work. The setting, Copp’s Hill Burying Ground, is the resting place of many Bostonians of the Colonial period, and one of Pickman’s favorite North End landmarks. Here, a doglike creature crouches over a freshly excavated grave, its face turned away from the viewer as it gnaws at an unseen morsel. Pickman’s “ghouls” are a potent metaphor for the destructive forces in his life: Boston’s changing culture, the carnage of the First World War, and his own disintegrating marriage.

**Richard Upton Pickman, “Three A.M.”**

Where Ghoul Feeding shows a solitary figure from behind, Three A.M. shows three of the monstrous creatures, two of them facing the viewer and pictured in photographic detail. Lit by a gas-burning streetlamp, they circle a homeless drunk, drawing nearer as he wakes and screams for help. Pickman’s January 1925 attempt to exhibit it at the Art Club was refused by the membership, a snub which only deepened his feelings of alienation: “Every day I feel closer to this nightmare world, as if it were only waiting to receive some tangible payment before admitting me fully to its secrets. I do not know what more is required…” (RUP to Alexander Thurber).

**Richard Upton Pickman, “Beacon Hill”**

This sprawling canvas shows a cross-section of Boston’s genteel Beacon Hill neighborhood. The surface landmarks indicate a roughly North-South layout, running from the Charles River past the State House (the tall building at center right), towards the Granary Burying Ground at the edge of Boston Common (far right). Beneath these familiar landmarks, Pickman imagines a densely packed network of tunnels and chambers, perhaps meant to evoke the trench systems of wartime France. The swarming population of ghouls dwelling within them suggest that even Boston’s highest society stands on a foundation of corruption. Given a final opportunity to apologize for his outlandish visions, Pickman told the Boston Art Club that, “he had paid for this knowledge, had exchanged what none of them would have willingly given. And yet it had not been his to begin with...” (diary of Newton Reid). Reid interpreted this cryptic statement as referring to Pickman’s reputation; Thurber, who served with him in France, suggested instead his lost innocence.

**Richard Upton Pickman, “The Changeling”**

In a quiet Colonial household, a gravely pious father reads from the Bible as his family listen attentively. The youngest son, at front left, looks directly at the viewer, grimacing in contempt. His face is a composite, combining animalistic features (the elongated canines, yellowed eyes and jutting lower jaw) with Pickman’s own. Pickman’s title suggests that the ghouls have exchanged him for a human infant, suggesting a source for the “rottennness” of human nature which could affect even his beloved Colonials.

**Amelia Vernon Pickman, sketches**

Amelia drew these pencil sketches of her daughter Catherine in late January 1926, only weeks before her fatal psychotic episode. Considered in light of the tragedy, the drawings clearly reveal her worsening mental condition, likely a result of schizophrenia exacerbated by her growing obsession with her husband’s disturbing underground world.

6-year-old Cathy is pictured in a variety of poses: hiding beneath a bed, crawling awkwardly down a flight of stairs, and crouching on the kitchen floor, gnawing a chicken bone. Her warped facial features resemble those of Pickman’s Changeling. Throughout the ensuing investigation, Amelia refused to admit that she had hurt her daughter, alternately blaming the crime on hallucinatory “beasts” and accusing her husband of replacing Cathy with “something else”.

## Gallery 5: Legacies

Pickman’s contemporaries seem to have reacted with relief to his disappearance, and his artistic reputation swiftly descended into obscurity. But only a few decades later, new movements in American art hinted that he had not been entirely forgotten; the Precisionist school built on Pickman’s hyperrealistic style to portray urban landscapes and mechanisms in crisp detail, accentuating both the beauty and the strangeness of modern life. Later hyperrealists like Chuck Close and Marilyn Minter cite Pickman as a core influence on their own disturbing, ultra-magnified images.

But Pickman’s most enduring legacy has been in the realm of entertainment. While Pickman himself found the “weird tales” told in comics and magazines to be trite and commercial, many “weird” artists found early inspiration in his scenes of supernatural horror. Nowadays, the adjective “Pickmanesque” stands not only for ghouls and underground cities but for a deep cynicism about human civilization: a sense of loneliness on a cosmic scale.

**Daniel Warren Johnson, Carlos Badilla, Caitlín R. Kiernan,[“Alabaster: The Good, the Bad and the Bird #3”](https://www.horrortalk.com/images/reviews_a_g/alabaster/the-good-the-bad-the-bird/issue-03/previews2/alabaster-good-bad-bird-3-04.jpg)**

Pickman’s influence on American pop culture is felt in hundreds of stories, comics and films; Caitlín R. Kiernan’s Alabaster series is only one example. The Alabaster graphic novels tell the story of albino monster-hunter Dancy Flammarion and her struggles against monstrous creatures in the swamps and bayous of the American south. Asked about her influences, Kiernan writes: “Our smallness and insignificance in the universe at large. In all possible universes. Within the concept of infinity. No one and nothing cares for us. No one’s watching out for us. To me, that’s Pickman.”

**Mike Mignola, Dave Stewart, Clem Robins,[“Hellboy: The Island #2”](https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/hellboy/images/5/59/Ogdru_Jahad_The_Island.png/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/1000?cb=20121118002434%20)**

Mike Mignola, whose Eisner-award-winning graphic novel series Hellboy debuted in 1993, acknowledges Pickman as one of his greatest influences: “One of the things people always comment on is how influenced my stuff is by R. U. Pickman and I think they’re usually referring to how shit usually comes up with [fangs] on it. But the bigger, Pickmanesque idea, or at least where I was introduced to the idea, is this gigantic, unknowable universe and how humanity is dwarfed by this giant, unknowable thing.” Unlike the helpless victims in Pickman’s paintings, Hellboy fights back against the darkness, though often with ambiguous results. This panel shows the Ogdru Jahad, seven apocalyptic dragons whose release would signal the end of the world.

**Elsie Driggs,[“Pittsburgh”](http://collection.whitney.org/object/125)**

A member of the Precisionist school, Driggs frames the pipes and smokestacks of this Pittsburgh steelworks against the pale glow of an overcast night sky. The elegant geometric contours of the plant are crisply rendered, but the overall effect is dark and forbidding, more fortress than cathedral.

**Chuck Close,[“Alex/Reduction Print”](http://chuckclose.com/work174.html)**

Chuck Close, who suffers from prosopagnosia (face blindness), began painting large, photorealistic portraits early in his career. His massive images of magnified faces accentuate the eerie, alienating aspects of the human form. Here, he captures his subject in a momentary toothy scowl which brings to mind Pickman’s uncanny Puritan changeling.

**Marilyn Minter,[“Cheshire (Wangechi Mutu)”](http://www.marilynminter.net/painting/cheshire-wangechi-mutu/)**

Pickman’s work was rarely erotic or sexual, but eroticism is a common element in the modern genre of the Pickmanesque. Marilyn Minter is a key figure in this transformation; her 1989 series of painted scenes from hard-core pornography used hyperrealism to “confus[e] our networks of disgust and desire” (Sehgal 2015, The New York Times). This enamel-on-metal image, a collaboration with Afrofuturist sculptor Wangechi Mutu, is part of Minter’s Pretty/Dirty series. It shows Mutu’s lips and teeth in terrifying closeup, glistening with gold paint. Is she seducer or victim, consumer or consumed?

**Unknown artist(s), “cathy cant go home”**

Discovered during 2013 renovations near the Haymarket MBTA station, this immense mural was concealed in the darkness of a disused siding nearly 200 feet from the platform. The artist(s) are unknown, though some have suggested an elaborate prank by Harvard or MIT students in the mid-1990s. The work was incised directly onto the tunnel walls with a sharp object, then filled in with red, black and white pigments which are still under investigation by forensic analysts. Only a few square feet could be recovered for display; the photograph below shows the entire work. Clawed and cloven-hoofed footprints spiral toward the center of the image. Small figures wander among them as if lost; some are doglike humanoids resembling Pickman’s ghouls, while others seem more like snakes, kangaroos or predatory birds. Dark rifts, some lined with fanglike teeth, cut across the lines of footprints, revealing strange lights that might be stars or explosions. The work’s title (prominently inscribed across the center in dark, jagged strokes) is an obvious reference to Pickman’s ill-fated daughter Catherine, perhaps proposing her as a new addition to the mythology of the Pickmanesque: a tragic figure, figuratively abandoned in a world beyond human comprehension.

**Author's Note:**

> What I found most interesting about "Pickman's Model" was Lovecraft's description of Pickman's style: "In every sense—in conception and in execution—a thorough, painstaking, and almost scientific realist." Who painted like that in 1926?! I decided that was the story I wanted to tell.
> 
> The quotations from Kiernan and Mignola are real (but for "Pickman" read "Lovecraft"), but to my knowledge, Close and Minter don't actually consider Lovecraft an influence! The Samuel Mather Parrington museum is the home of Sarah Monette's Kyle Murchison Booth. Everything else is true except for the parts I made up.
> 
> Thanks to my anonymous beta reader for a great deal of excellent advice.


End file.
